When my Media Center was new the Recorded TV loaded in a flash, but now with about 750GB of recorded material it takes about 5-10 seconds to display. The slowdown has been gradual as more material has been added to the library.

Is there any way to speed this up? I would've thought that there was some service that monitored the Recorded TV folder(s) and maintained a list of what was there, along with thumbnails, so that it could be displayed quickly. Surely it doesn't scan the folders everytime?

The recordings are shared over two drives, both 5400rpm SATA drives (320GB boot, 1TB data), which I appreciate are never going to be the fastest. I have considered moving all the TV to the larger drive to see if that speeds things up, might this help?

What I'm really hoping for that there is some way in which this data might be more effectively cached. Or something.

2 Answers
2

I am running a similar spec'ed but not quite as fast machine (Core 2 Duo 1.8). I have over a TB in recorded video on a Samsung ECO Green drive (which isn't exactly a speed demon, but might be faster than your 5400 drive) and I never see this behavior.

If you get slow response while playing but not recording, likely not a drive issue. I have been able to record two HD streams while watching a third and never an issue. About the only time I have seen slow behavior is just after I set up my (reinstall) and pointed the TV Recording to my 1.5 TB drive. The "import" took a few minutes.